Before embarking on your career at Yale, you should know something about Yale's philosophy of education. Reading this section will give you some background about what the academic part of a Yale undergraduate education ought to be.
In his baccalaureate address to the Class of 1985, A. Bartlett
Giamatti, president of Yale from 1978 to 1986, provided a useful summary of the fundamental aims and values of a liberal
education:
Yale's liberal education is an education meant to increase in young people a sense of the joy that learning for the sake of learning brings, learning whose goal is not professional mastery or technical capacity or commercial advantage, but the commencement of a life-long pleasure in the human exercise of our minds, our most human part. It is an education whose spirit is designed to remind us that education is life-long and will be the means, far more than a job or career, to forge those links with family, neighbor, community and country that will allow each to sustain the other. It is also an education in the development of that most practical of human activities, which is thinking—analytically, creatively, humanely—and in expressing the results of that thinking, in speech and in writing, with clarity, logic, and grace. In the fundamental acts of thinking and expressing, the fundamental human parts of ourselves are initially shaped and then shared, and that shaping and sharing starts in what we call a liberal education, an education in the making of those orders whence freedom derives and by which it is defended.
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